The paper investigates Evolution Strategies (ES) as a memory‑efficient post‑training method for large language model (LLM) reasoning. It demonstrates that ES outperforms Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) by achieving broader reasoning coverage, improving Pass@K metrics, and avoiding entropy collapse. The study also reveals that ES’s performance gains stem from sparse, high‑magnitude parameter updates, do not cause catastrophic forgetting, and can be combined with GRPO in a sequential training strategy.
arXiv:2608. 05541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evolution Strategy (ES) is a promising alternative to gradient-based fine-tuning for resource-constrained Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning.
arXiv:2604. 01499v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space.
arXiv:2601. 20379v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex, long-horizon reasoning due to instability caused by their frozen policy assumption.
arXiv:2605. 11936v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent soft prompt research has tried to improve reasoning by inserting trained vectors into LLM inputs, yet whether the gain comes from the learned content or from the act of injection itself has not been carefully separated.
arXiv:2505. 09655v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning.
arXiv:2605. 30789v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We identify a new dimension for enhancing rollout diversity in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for LLMs.
arXiv:2606. 10184v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) relies on the diversity of $K$ rollouts within each group; otherwise, the group-mean advantage $A^{(k)} = r^{(k)} - \mu_r$ collapses to zero.
ReST‑RL introduces a unified Reinforced Self‑Training (ReST) policy‑value framework that enhances large language model (LLM) reasoning by combining an optimized ReST‑style GRPO algorithm with a value‑guided search (VM‑MCTS). The ReST‑GRPO component reshapes trajectory distributions to increase reward variance and expose policies to more informative partial states, improving training efficiency. VM‑MCTS trains a Value Model from self‑collected Monte‑Carlo Tree Search targets and uses it during inference to provide precise process signals and verification scores, boosting reasoning accuracy across coding benchmarks and out‑of‑domain math and science tasks.
arXiv:2602. 05547v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: RL-based post-training with GRPO is widely used to improve large language models on individual reasoning tasks.
The paper critiques the common reinforcement‑learning approach of sampling tool subsets when the full set of tools is enumerable, showing that sampling leads to degraded policy estimates and increased reward sparsity in genomic reasoning tasks. It proposes Full‑Group Policy Optimization (FGPO), which evaluates every tool subset and precomputes rewards in a table, thereby eliminating the need for frozen‑reasoner calls during training. Experiments across five frozen reasoners and three genomic benchmarks demonstrate that FGPO consistently outperforms GRPO, improving average scores by 6.75 points and reducing the number of invoked tools per question.
arXiv:2607. 26862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard reinforcement learning method for post-training language models.
arXiv:2509. 25004v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models, but most methods still optimize reasoning trajectories over the static problem set, wasting rollout budget on solved or overly difficult problems.